Cryptocurrency

Last year, Austin scored a major coup when it landed Consensus 2022, a big in-person conference focused on the digital finance industry, specifically cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. CoinDesk, a news and research company focused on the cryptocurrency industry, chose the Texas capital for its return to an in-person conference and it arrived splashy and huge, taking over not only the Austin Convention Center but several adjacent hotels and event spaces, its 17,000 attendees swarming downtown. This was June of last year. Three months earlier, South by Southwest, the city’s long-running big tech and culture conference had been a veritable playground for NFT enthusiasts, and dozens of panels hyped the transformative importance of the blockchain.

Dealing with the writer, statistician, Twitter warrior and self-described flâneur Nassim Nicholas Taleb is no simple matter. First there was the initial approach, months ago. I ventured to email him and ask for an interview despite his long-held and often-expressed low opinion of journalists. (Heuristic: those who make the biggest deal out of disliking the media care about it the most.) To my surprise, Taleb agreed to it almost immediately even though he “doesn’t do interviews.” Some logistical back and forth ensued. Then a twist: he would only agree to be interviewed if he wasn’t photographed. Why? Because in photos he is “made to look sickly and weak.

In the precarious world economy of 2023, everyone is selling you something — and much of that something doesn’t amount to anything. Companies, of course, sell you products and services; much of their junk amounts to solutions for problems that didn’t previously exist, though at least there’s still some sort of deliverable. Meanwhile, in worlds as essential to human flourishing as personal finance and bodily fitness, an ever-expanding class of so-called “influencers” are selling a whole lot of nothing dressed up as something. Their underlying success, ostensibly tied to their ability to help people become richer or fitter, depends in actuality on their ability to sell advice or investment opportunities that are likely only to enrich themselves. How did this happen?

This time last year, football fans dubbed the Super Bowl the "Crypto Bowl," after eToro, Coinbase, Crypto.com and FTX all paid for airtime. Just twelve months on, Mark Evans, the executive vice president of ad sales for Fox Sports, told the Associated Press there would be "zero representation in that category on the day at all," following the disastrous downfall of FTX, In other sporting news, NFL legend Tom Brady has finally retired, which is nice for him. Anyone who took his investment advice won’t be doing that any time soon. The seven-time Super Bowl champion is currently named in a class action lawsuit that claims he and his now-ex Gisele Bundchen lured fans into a massive fraud.

For anyone seeking direct proof that woke capitalism is nothing but a scam, look no further than Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of the now bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, who says as much in a direct message exchange with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper. He calls “ethics” a “dumb game we woke Westerners play” — presumably to avoid any scrutiny from journalists, employees, investors and consumers. I’ve worked for and with these people for decades. They want to convince you and the employees in their company that they are in it out of the goodness of their philanthropic hearts. They are just trying to make the world a better place, you see.

Bankrupted crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is the talk of the town thanks to the implosion of his heavily celebrity- and lawmaker-endorsed digital currency platform, FTX. SBF cleverly disguised his shaky financial schemes behind an awkward personality and philosophy labeled as “Effective Altruism,” meaning giving away massive amounts of wealth in the name of simply doing good. It’s a popular philosophical fad that has caught on among progressive global elites in the philanthropy arena and seems to be quite popular among media elites as well. Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced a plan to donate most of his wealth, on the same day that 10,000 jobs were to be eliminated at Amazon.

Things aren’t going well for Tom Brady. His team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has a losing record. He is getting divorced, and FTX, the crypto exchange he was touting a year ago — and in which he was invested — has gone bust. He isn’t the only sports star with egg on his face after the collapse of FTX. Stephen Curry, Shohei Ohtani and Naomi Osaka, to name just three, also got greedy and believed the vision of Sam Bankman-Fried. Overnight, Sam Bankman-Fried has gone from crypto wunderkind to infamous huckster. The celebrities, influencers and traditional media outlets that helped make him a star shouldn’t be allowed to absolve themselves as quickly.

It’s been a great year for those of us who didn’t have the nerve to invest in crypto. The value of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Luna crashed in May. Now, crypto giant FTX has gone bankrupt amid serious allegations of criminal misconduct. At last! For years, we kicked ourselves for not investing in Bitcoin, ETH, et cetera, when we had the chance. We heard tales of people who went from bums to millionaires, while we grinded in our offices and fretted about debts. Suddenly, we can reframe our risk aversion as foresight! Of course we knew that this would happen! Of course we did! Really, I shouldn’t joke about this crypto craziness. A lot of people have lost a lot of money. People will lose businesses, homes, and families. Some might even commit suicide.

In recent weeks, the world’s richest man and his flailing attempts to figure out what to do with Twitter have dominated the news cycle. However, his unhinged management-by-tweets reality show are nothing compared to an almighty tussle between two crypto-bros. Internet magic money (aka crypto) billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, is the man behind FTX, a crypto exchange. He seems to have angered fellow magic money billionaire and fremeny, Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ and CEO of the rival exchange Binance. It might have to do with FTX cozying up to regulators to get the regulations beneficial to the FTX but not its rivals.

‘Forecasting is a mug’s game’ is a truism attributed to everyone from fantasy author Douglas Adams to former Bank of England governor Mervyn King. It reminds us that commentators should never be smug when they call the near future right, or quick to crow at others who turned out to be wrong. I may have been a step or two ahead of the pack this season on inflation and recession risks and I’ve always said crypto, which we’ll come to in a moment, was the road to perdition. But I confess my record on property trends is frankly lamentable.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s food price index rose 13 per cent last month to stand a third higher than a year ago. Within the index, cereals rose by 17 per cent – driven by interrupted Ukrainian and Russian wheat supplies – and vegetable oils by 23 per cent, Ukraine being the world’s biggest sunflower farmer. In the UK, wholesale milk is up 20 per cent, as farmers face rising fuel and feed costs. Supermarkets squeeze suppliers to suppress retail prices: but soon, around the same time as our next quarterly gas bills, we’ll feel the full impact at the checkout. And then what?